https://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/AdventuresInElectronicMusic/
"Sometimes it doesn't take much to nudge one's life in a little different
direction, and for this direction to then blossom into a career and decades of
delights working in the computer industry.
Probably sometime around 1969 — when I was 16 years old — I bought an album
entitled
Switched-On Bach by Walter (later, Wendy) Carlos and Benjamin
Folkman, which had been released the previous year. I wasn't unusual in this
respect. Many people bought this album. It was one of the best-selling
classical albums of all time and it received three Grammy Awards.
Switched-On Bach consists of several compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach
(1685–1750) played on a Moog electronic music synthesizer, including a complete
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 with a spacey middle movement composed by Carlos
and Folkman for the recording. I must have read some articles about the album
because it was very clear to me how it was made: Although the Moog synthesizer
had a keyboard, it was essentially monophonic, so each melodic line had to be
recorded separately on a multitrack tape recorder.
Switched-On Bach was an important event in my life. I loved the music, and it
initiated an interest in classical music that led to a collection of about
1,200 classical LPs by the early 1980s, eventually to be replaced with a
current collection of well over a thousand classical CDs.
But I also knew that I wanted to make electronic music myself. I didn't grow up
in a household with musical instruments (apart from my mother's old accordion
in the closet) and although I could read music — apparently I picked it up in
some "music appreciation" course and never lost it — I couldn't play anything.
Nevertheless, tunes of my own invention would often rattle around in my head. I
wanted to hear them for real, and realizing them using electronic music seemed
ideal.
This is the story of how I eventually built my own electronic music instruments
while teaching myself digital electronics, computer hardware, and assembly
language programming. Roughly between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, this
hobby (and it was never really more than a hobby) led directly to my being able
to write assembly language programs for the IBM PC in the early 1980s, which
led to my career at PC Magazine beginning in 1984, which led to the rest of my
career. This hobby also gave me the background knowledge and understanding to
write the book
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
(1999)."
Via Diane A.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
